At one marketing-overrun startup, the suits were calling two hour meetings every afternoon and then wondering why I wasn't getting any work done.
So I installed a cuckoo clock in that meeting room. The CEO loved it; he even helped wind it. I knew I'd succeeded when one of the marketing types looked at the clock and said, "I hate that thing." I don't remember if the meetings got any shorter or less frequent, but they were a little more enjoyable.
[I invested some money in that place. They pulled some shenanigans, and my piece of a billion dollar company got zeroed out. But I still have the clock.]
Love it. A few years ago at a place I was helping out in, one of the devs had built a clock for the conference room that, at the start of a meeting, you punched the number of people in the meeting into. It knew the average company salary (this was a ~15 person software house) and would count up the "money spent" given the number of people in the room and the time on the clock. Very motivating.
Did the clock also total up all the days spent down rabbit-holes resulting in worthless work because there wasn't adequate communication? :)
It does remind me though of a guy I once knew (late 90s) who was a senior manager at the national arm of a large, well-known international investment bank. He'd be in a meeting with the CEO and the rest of the senior managers, and the CEO wouldn't let the meeting commence if there were any computer cords visible, sometimes taking up to 15 minutes to personally clear away cords...
It's true that there's a balance... maybe some kind of amplification based on the # of people. Nothing frustrates me more than a 20-person meeting with three guys talking (actual all-hands meetings to communicate critical info excepted, of course).
Someone I worked with at a previous job tried the average salary clock thing. I mentioned to him that if he really cared, he could just work late to make up for the loss. The clock didn't come to any more meetings.
The problem with the meeting (hourly rate | billable rate) × members × time cost approach is this: a well-performed meeting is what provides your worth. In this sense, considering a meeting to be a cost based on what you can charge for your time is as ridiculous as a professional sports team considering workouts and training to be costed at the average revenue rate of a game.
The training is what provides the ability to charge for admission and airtime royalties for games. The meeting is what gives you a product or service offering.
The question shouldn't be "how much is this costing us in salaries" but "is this meeting productive, and more productive than the alternative activity which could be performed at this time" -- the opportunity cost basis, in other words. Salary/billable is simply the wrong metric.
To the sports metaphor, the question concerning training would be "is this training improving our skills / ability / capability / teamwork", as compared with alternatives (rest/recovery, marketing, travel, game time).
Where meetings often get derailed is that participants:
• Don't understand one another.
• Have different agendas.
• Are simply incompetent.
Identifying these challenges and addressing them, without bogging all participants down in the process is far more productive than simply showing the cumulative pseudo-cost of the meeting.
> The training is what provides the ability to charge for admission and airtime royalties for games. The meeting is what gives you a product or service offering.
The cost analysis of the meeting is however helpful to make people realize that there's way too many people in that meeting. It's just like a sports team where half of the players are not actively training while you're paying them all. And on top of that, the effectiveness of a meeting decreases very quickly with the number of participants.
While I do agree with you that the opportunity cost based analysis is better, I do want to point out that for this context (or any context where this might be the case) the opportunity cost of doing an opportunity cost based analysis might be high enough to warrant opting for the inferior but easier/cheaper cost based analysis.
Of course there might be an easier way to quantify the opportunity cost that I can't think of.
"Is the the best possible use of our time, collectively, and/or of each of us, individually, for the organization and our collective goals?"
I suspect you'll find that more effective people tend to recognize when they're in a meeting they 1) don't need to be in and 2) which is keeping them from doing something more important.
Socializing, strengthening group cohesion, and other organizational (as opposed to individualistic) objectives may mean that even if you personally perceive greater benefit at being elsewhere, the organizational / collective goal may still trump, which is why that's included in the metric.
The concern isn't to do a thorough evaluation where that's not itself cost-effective, but to use the correct basis for measurement. Deciding on imperfect information is perfectly acceptable. Deciding on the wrong basis should really be avoided where possible.
No. I mean the startup in question went on to be worth about a billion dollars (last I checked), but the stock I bought from them was turned into wastepaper through some mechanism that I don't understand. Might have been a rescue job of some kind. Maybe they're lying and owe me a bunch of money. I don't know.
So I installed a cuckoo clock in that meeting room. The CEO loved it; he even helped wind it. I knew I'd succeeded when one of the marketing types looked at the clock and said, "I hate that thing." I don't remember if the meetings got any shorter or less frequent, but they were a little more enjoyable.
[I invested some money in that place. They pulled some shenanigans, and my piece of a billion dollar company got zeroed out. But I still have the clock.]